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Altered
reality
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Jack, Bonnie, Dana at old city, Shanghai
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SHANGHAI, China - We've been in China only a couple
of weeks, and our view reality already is altered.
In our neighborhood near Fudan University, the residential complexes
of rectangular four-story apartment buildings are neatly enclosed
by concrete walls about 10 feet high. The streets are pleasant,
despite the relentless humidity and grit. Leafy trees line the
sidewalks, which are made of stippled concrete in 2-foot squares.
People of all ages amble easily along on bicycles, some with carts
attached and ringing cowbells as they go. Little children with
smiling faces straight out of 17th century etchings hold hands
with dad or mom.
Everyone stares at us, everywhere we go. Especially at my son
Jack, whose bright blond hair generates intense curiosity. In
bustling department stores, where there are three clerks for every
two customers, it seems, friendly counter women form small crowds
around us and touch Jack's irresistible head. He tries to shun
the attention by averting his eyes, but it's no use - in China,
averting your eyes is decorous politeness.
It's a pleasant holdover of manners from bygone days. Today,
China's largest cities - Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou (aka Canton)
- are to unschooled Western eyes amazingly modern, and growing
more so at a breakneck pace. In Beijing and Shanghai, cities of
13 million and 14 million people, high-rise buildings are under
construction seemingly everywhere. The windows of huge office
towers gleam along the skylines, signaling China's determination
to lift its economy and its culture into the 21st century - a
determination not only to share in the material wealth of America
and Europe, but to play a major role in how this century's history,
culture and economies develop.
It's a gigantic task. Officially, China's population is 1.2 billion
people; unofficially, probably much more. Huge as the cities are,
over 800 million Chinese live in the countryside, which we are
told lags far behind in the most rudimentary luxuries, such as
telephone lines, basic medical care, and jobs. Because of the
government's efforts to open China's economy to the West as much
as seems prudent, 150 million agricultural workers are either
unemployed or likely to become unemployed.
This of course poses dangerous problems for China's leaders,
who are well aware of the political, social and economic risks
of their actions - and the even greater risks of nonaction. The
country people live much the way their ancestors did, and so the
problem is not only economic, but deeply cultural: In order to
keep itself together, China must bring as many of its people as
possible into the mainstream economy, and to be brought into the
mainstream, the people need to learn to live in a world of automobiles,
cell phones, computers, banks and - the Chinese fervently hope
- a working law enforcement and court system. The country people
are not used to these things.
It's as if there are two Chinas: the urban east of Beijing, Shanghai,
Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and the rural west where illiteracy is
a fundamental problem. It's possible to think of the East as new,
and the West as old, as if on the one hand China's 5,000-year-old
culture had disappeared in the cities' construction of high-rises,
and its ancient agricultural lifeways, on the other, were stuck
in the dust and heat of the farms.
But it's not so simple. As one U.S. official said to us, many
Chinese hold the view that China had 4,500 pretty good years,
until exploiting Westerners kicked them around for 150 years or
so, and then communism, with its good points and bad, moved in
for about 40 years. Now, in this view, China is engaged in a major
cultural upheaval, a sea change, as they say, while it reinvents
itself. China is intent on educating and modernizing its rural
areas, while its ancient heritage subtly remains in the cities.
Even now, we are learning to catch glimpses of China's past,
probably the way archaeologists learn to recognize fossils: Once
you know what to look for, they're everywhere. And they function,
though not the way a Westerner might typically think.
Turning into the main gate of Fudan University, for example,
you are faced suddenly by an enormous, looming statue of Mao Zedong.
It's carefully placed to take over your field of vision as you
enter the campus, and the effect is hair-raising. Is it a monument
to the glories of communism? Not exactly. A reminder of the social
and political chaos of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and
'70s when so many Chinese suffered terribly? Not exactly that,
either.
What, then? Well perhaps, like the Great Wall of China, which
was first built in the 200s BC, extended in the 1300s to hold
back the invading Mongols and is carefully maintained today, the
statue of Chairman Mao indicates a sense of the wholeness of Chinese
culture, its radiant achievements and its darkest moments taken
together as a single heritage, a single fluid moment.
Its great beauty and its violence. Along the top of the concrete
walls enclosing the apartment complexes in our Shanghai neighborhood,
colored glass forms delicate, intricately abstract patterns, pleasing
to the eye, really. The glass is in shards, cemented upright on
the wall top; its beauty, like the whole of Chinese culture, exists
simultaneously with danger - you don't want to scale this wall
because the broken glass is the delicate Chinese equivalent of
barbed wire.
In Shanghai's streets, life goes on energetically as it has for
Asian millennia. On the sidewalks, people carefully scrub their
hands and arms over tubs of soapy water. In the open-air market,
men and women laugh and chat as they dicker over onions and bags
of live frogs. Taxis honk their ways through bikes and pedestrians.
The humidity is no bother because the pace is remarkably slow;
we imagine this same pace 200 years ago when Europeans began to
push in, a thousand years ago when Shanghai was no more than a
fishing village at the mouth of the great Yangzi River.
In the coming year, we Americans will learn practically from
scratch about one of the richest and most important cultures in
human history.
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if you would like to submit your own story and/or photographs.
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